BEIRUT — Nearly 30,000 Syrian children born as refugees in Lebanon are in a legal limbo, not registered with any government, exposing them to the risk of a life of statelessness and deprived of basic rights.

It is a problem that is replicated, to varying degrees, in nations across the Middle East, where more than 3.3 million Syrians have found safe haven from the intractable civil war in their homeland.

The life of a stateless person is a life without a nationality, without citizenship, without the basic documents that establish an individual’s identity and give him or her the rights afforded everyone else. Without a birth certificate, identity papers or other documents, even basic things like getting married, going to school or finding a job can be next to impossible.

“If you can’t prove your nationality, it means you can’t get legal documentation, can’t cross borders legally, can’t enjoy any other basic rights that citizens of a country are entitled to,” said Isabella Castrogiovanni, a senior child protection specialist with UNICEF. “So the consequences are obviously huge.”

The United Nations launched a campaign last month to try to end statelessness for an estimated 10 million people around the world within 10 years.

Syria’s civil war is one of the major trouble spots, with more than 3 million people fleeing to neighboring countries to escape the bloodshed.

For Syrian refugee women who give birth, acquiring the legal documentation with the local government is a chief concern. And yet, an estimated 70 percent of the 42,000 children born to Syrian parents in Lebanon since the uprising against President Bashar Assad began in March 2011 remain off the books, according to the U.N. refugee agency.

That figure only relates to the 1.1 million refugees registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Lebanese officials estimate there are another 500,000 unregistered Syrians in the country. It is not known how many children have been born among that population. Whatever the number, they likely have an even lower rate of registration.

The daily hardships of life as a refugee keep many Syrian parents from registering their newborns: no money, no documents, little time off from work. The process is complicated, with multiple steps that require travel from one government office to another, fees and, most important, a slew of documents. Without the parents’ marriage license, for example, the birth of a child cannot be registered. But many Syrians fled their homeland on short notice and so left legal papers behind, or their papers were destroyed.

At a natal clinic in a run-down neighborhood in south Beirut, a mother named Khawla from the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria cradled her newborn son, Yousef, in her arms as her curly-haired 2-year-old, Mohammed, stomped around the damp pavement.

“It took us eight months to register Mohammed,” she said. “We’re waiting for a miracle to register Yousef.”

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